Reading Working-Class: Nine Books and a Bonus or Two
I appreciated the hell out of Deborah Dundas’s recent book, On Class, a slim volume in which Dundas does much to unpack what many Canadians are too polite to articulate, too fearful to admit, or too snobbish to account as important: that many of us grew up, remain, or are related to working-class people. Because of this cultural reticence, “working-class” is a notoriously slippery term, perhaps obscured by our obsessions with celebrity culture and late-stage capitalism, and the dubious pleasures of retail therapy and having just way, way too much. Who would admit to being out of step with all that?
Well, me. I was raised in a working-class culture. Phrases like “we don’t waste money that way” and “we can’t afford it” were a regular part of my family’s vocabulary, and the word “fancy” was not a compliment. While there were plenty who had less and plenty who had more, wealth was defined in my childhood by the meals you did not miss, your ability to feed the most people on any occasion, and ways you gave away what little you had. It also meant that many people became ill and died in part due to their “never enough” work ethic, and many descendants feel deeply ambivalent about the possibility of crossing class barriers.
To this day, I am unsure that I have successfully crossed a barrier, or if I should be thinking about that at all. But I know this: when I read one of those New York novels, where everything takes place on an expensive piece of real estate, at a cocktail party, in a corporate office or [insert grand edifice here], I am very distracted by the money flowing by the characters like bottled water and just who is cleaning up the glasses afterwards. How did all these people know what to wear? Who is paying the check? The expression “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it” is smug, but it’s also right.
So I have a special fondness for books that address the working-class world in which people can’t afford everything, and where the loss of twenty dollars by accident or rip-off or a spasm of overspending becomes a plot point because it’s a serious pinch in the ability to eat, dress, travel, or irony of ironies, prepare for work. Acknowledging the slipperiness of the definition and its changeability throughout eras and circumstances, I am giving “working-class book” a working definition: a book which describes a world in which labour is absolutely necessary and physically demanding, and in which not having enough money to change circumstances is a shaping factor of the plot, and/or the characters.
There’s something subversive about reading working-class lives in fiction. We’re supposed to want to know how the other half lives, but I first read Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women when I was fifteen, and remember how bracing it was to overhear conversations between teenage girls speaking passionately about laundering their one cardigan carefully because they would still have to wear it even if they ruined it. No fast fashion: everyone doing less with less. I was discovering how my half lived on the page. (For the record, I still mourn a pair of irreplaceable royal-blue corduroys ruined by my own laundry mishap in 1982.)
Canned fruit. Frozen vegetables. Instant noodles. I still eat these, still have a junk drawer and a cold cupboard, still mend crockery and socks. Join me now for a list of books where people make enough to live, but cannot solve their problems with money: books that show work as labour, not career.
Caveat: shout out to Margaret Laurence, Adele Wiseman, and Sinclair Ross, but I’ll be talking about books written more recently, lest we believe that working-class lives disappeared in the twentieth century.
Chicken Girl
by Heather Smith
In St. John’s Newfoundland, our protagonist works by wearing a chicken suit as an advertisement for a local diner, and finds friends in a community of precariously housed people by the river. There are big laughs, bigger drama, and moral confrontations about money, food, privacy, housing, queer lives, child care, and human cruelty. If you haven’t read Smith, prepare to have your socks knocked off. Bonus: I also recommend Smith’s more recent novel Barry Squires, Full Tilt, in which the protagonist has to improvise dance equipment he can’t afford.
The Sleeping Car porter
by Suzette Mayr
If you have been living under a rock or have just been putting off reading this juggernaut/fever dream of a novel, let me add to the praise it has garnered. This novel is ALL work (with the exception of fitful dreams and a few scenes at the end). It is also ALL demonstrations of class inequality and power: between the white train passengers, between the white passengers and the black porters, between porters with more seniority and Baxter, the hardest-working man on the rails and in CanLit. Speaking of class mobility, Baxter needs his porter’s job in order to pay tuition at university for dental studies.
Onion Man
by Kathryn Mockler
Mockler’s first book takes place in and around a corn-canning factory in 1980s southwestern Ontario, what the publisher calls “a time in Canada when the recession lay like a lead weight on the shoulders of young people, leaving the future bleak.” I remember working in a terrible job in my no-money 1980s and when I read Onion Man, I could feel the stickiness of an unairconditioned summer workplace, the smells, the listlessness of the workers, especially the young people, the no reason-to-do-anything dead-end of it all. Technically, Onion Man is a story told in poetry, but it reads like a novel – you know, stuff happens, and people speak like they speak.
The Factory Voice
by Jeanette Lynes
In Thunder Bay in the 1940s, factory work is women’s war work: building airplanes. Within the novel, “The Factory Voice” is the newsletter for the workers, written by one of the youngest of them and featuring the giddiness of 1) her joy at having a job and earning money, and 2) her awe that one of the women is an airplane designer. This is Lynes’ first novel and deserves wider readership.
Dear Current Occupant
by Chelene Knight
Knight’s second book, a memoir in verse, grabbed me with its premise and held on. Knight revisits all the places she lived as a kid in financially precarious circumstances in Vancouver, addressing the people who now live in those apartments and uncared-for houses, and of course, her own child-and-teen self. Including photographs of the locations.
How to Pronounce Knife
by Souvankham Thammavongsa
This Giller Prize winner has many stories about labour, and I’ll point out just two of them: “Mani-Pedi” in which a former boxer turned a beauty clinician considers his chances with a well-off client while his hilariously foul-mouthed sister who runs the salon tells him he does not stand a chance; and the grittily triumphant “Picking Worms” in which a tough-minded widow supports her daughter by devising the fastest and most ingenious work methods.
The Summer of My Amazing Luck
by Miriam Toews
Another first novel, this one was given new life via Toews’ GG-win for A Complicated Kindness. But here young welfare moms compete with other welfare moms for resources in Winnipeg in the 1980s, and the novel features a road trip with two young women, an infant, and four other kids under ten. What’s the work? Feeding kids on almost nothing but the two moms’ friendship and youthful optimism.
Brother
by David Chariandy
Every time I read Brother, I am struck by the impossibility of the family’s situation carved out by the impossible labour the mother undertakes and the equally-gruelling urban travel she undertakes to get to those jobs. I know it’s most often read as a novel about the two brothers, but it’s also a generational story built on the framework of women’s back-breaking, skin-roughening “unskilled” labour.
On Class
by Deborah Dundas
Don’t forget this one. Excellent Canadian-authored companion to bell hooks’ classic Where We Stand: Class Matters and Paul Fussell’s weird and wonderful Class: Style and Status in the USA. Bonus from south of the 49th parallel: Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.
Tanis MacDonald is an essayist, poet, professor and free-range literary animal. She is the host of the podcast Watershed Writers, and the author of Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female and Out of Line: Daring to Be an Artist Outside the Big City. Her essay “Mondegreen Girls” won the Open Seasons Award for Creative Nonfiction in 2021. She identifies as a bad birder, and lives near Ose’kowáhne in southwestern Ontario as a grateful guest on traditional Haudenosaunee territory.
